Germany puts its energy in windmills ............................................
Sunday, May 21, 2006
BY DAVID DeKOK
As I drove a diesel car along the winding rural roads of southern Germany recently, I thought about two things.
One, how beautiful the scenery was. And two, that I was paying the equivalent of $5.50 per gallon for the diesel fuel I was burning in this small Ford station wagon. Gasoline costs even more, upwards of $6 per gallon after liters are converted to gallons and Euros to dollars.
It's hard not to think about the cost of energy in Germany, a nation of 80 million people crammed into a land the size of Montana. It never seems crowded here, though, in part because of strict anti-sprawl controls and an acceptance by much of the German public of lifelong apartment dwelling. Energy simply costs more here, and as a result, Germans try to use less of it and aren't shy about telling you how they do it.
Germany, unlike the United States, also signed the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming. That has led to profound changes here in energy usage that rival those caused by high fuel prices.
I have relatives throughout southern Germany and a few in Berlin. Those in the south mainly live in villages and own farms. Although you can get to a vast majority of German cities and towns by train, and by bus to the rest, I find it much easier to travel to the rural parts of the country in a car. That's why I rented one before leaving Stuttgart.
High gasoline and diesel prices make it quite natural across Germany for people of all ages to ride bicycles (often without helmets) to get around town. Walking is more prevalent, and so is use of public transportation. Buses and trains run frequently and are highly reliable. Europeans have focused on diesel autos for fuel economy, while we in America have gone the hybrid route.
Diesel cars have a bad reputation in Germany, stemming from the few that were available in the 1970s and 1980s. The perception is that they are hard to start in winter and pollute more than gas-powered vehicles. I suspect that a slick marketing campaign could re-educate the public and overcome a lot of those concerns.
Diesel technology has advanced greatly, and the main issue now would be adding a diesel pump to the service stations in Germany which don't have one already. Every German service station has at least one diesel pump. I even saw a pump for bio-diesel -- made from organic products -- at one station I passed. Bio-diesel here is the cheapest liquid fuel of all.
On the home and farm, there seems to be a shift where possible to the use of high-efficiency, wood-burners to provide heat. This seems driven by the rising cost of Erdgaz (natural gas) and heating oil, and of fears that Russia might once again cut off gas supplies in a price dispute.
Russian President Vladimir Putin cut off gas to the Ukraine in a price dispute on Jan. 1. European countries further down the pipeline lost 20 percent to 35 percent of their gas supplies. Putin caved in to world pressure and restored the gas after four days, but the incident clearly rattled the Germans.
My cousin, Walther Kilian, showed me a large furnace he had installed to burn wood chips. He harvests trees from his own forest and hires a man with a wood-chipper to process them. An automatic hopper feeds the chips into the furnace, and out comes heat for the house and the barn where he raises hogs.
Both the wind and solar energy business have boomed in Germany in the wake of Kyoto. A United Nations study found that wind and solar power offered 40 percent more jobs per dollar than coal. Germany leads the world in wind energy production, with more than 16,000 windmills in use.
I saw several of them on my drive, new since I was last here in 2003. I drove close to one and was amazed by how quiet it was -- just a soft, whup, whup, whup. My cousin, Friederich Freudenberger, lives in the village of Lindlein a quarter-mile away, and says he can't hear them at all unless the wind is blowing toward his house.
The state government of Baden-Wurttemberg co-invests with farmers in windmills. Walther considered it, but decided he was too old (58) for it to pay off. Renate, his wife, doesn't like seeing windmills on the horizon, a common sentiment in Germany.
There is a surprising amount of solar power usage. In the village of Elpersheim, where my grandfather was born in 1901, there is a solar panel dealer, and I observed a number of houses in the village with solar roof panels. Willy Dummler, husband of my cousin, Waltraud, said they are supplemental in his cold country, providing enough hot water in the spring, summer, and fall, but not in the winter.
Most of the panels are photo-voltaic, producing electricity to feed back into the grid. My German wasn't good enough to inquire much about that aspect of solar energy.
Kyoto and state policy mandating high liquid fuel costs have done much to move Germany down the path toward a less energy-intensive future. America will be eight years behind Germany in energy policy by the time the Bush administration ends in 2008. It won't be American companies getting the lion's share of those renewable energy jobs. |
